Japan scored fifteen out of fifteen. In my unofficial theory of nations, three questions about how a country speaks, how it cooks and what it builds, Japan filled every block, France missed one and Germany missed three. My own country got a box near the bottom headed in fairness, and a last section that would not turn into a scorecard at all.
I left it unscored because I grew up inside the problem. I was born in Gujranwala, in Punjab, and raised in Guddu, a WAPDA colony town in the north of Sindh, close to where the two provinces meet. I speak the languages of both. Long before I had a theory of nations, I knew that one country could give more than one answer to every question you put to it.
- Why a scorecard breaks the moment it reaches a country of a dozen peoples.
- The river that holds them together, and nine thousand years strung along its banks.
- The one craft every one of them shares, and where it came from.
A Column Needs One Answer
A scorecard works because every country answers each question once. Ask Japan how it cooks and the answer is care, down to sushi rice kept at body temperature so it does not shock the fish. Ask Germany how it builds and the answer is an engineer re-machining a part that was three hundredths of a millimetre off. Ask Pakistan how it cooks and you have asked a dozen kitchens at once, from sajji roasting whole over open coals in Balochistan to Kashmiri chai poured pink. They share a flag and a passport. The menus are another matter.
Under one flag sit a dozen peoples, each with its own tongue, its own table, its own music and its own thousand-year memory, and the whole of it still holds together as one nation. So I left it almost unscored, on purpose. Pakistan is not a place you can put in a column. It is one you have to walk into.
What Holds It Is a River
What holds it is a river. The Indus rises in Tibet, fed by snow and glaciers, enters Pakistan through the mountains of the north, gathers the five rivers of Punjab and runs the length of the country to the Arabian Sea: about three thousand kilometres, three quarters of them ours. Trace it on a map and you are drawing a spine. Almost everything that follows grew along its banks.
Guddu sits on that spine. A barrage there has held the Indus back at the northern edge of Sindh since 1962, and the reach below it, down to Sukkur, has been a reserve for the Indus river dolphin since 1974, home to more of them than anywhere else. The dolphin is nearly blind and finds its way through the silt by sound. It is a fitting animal for this river.
Nine Thousand Years on the Same Water
And it grew for a very long time. At Mehrgarh, near the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, people were farming about nine thousand years ago. Harappa, on an old course of the Ravi, and Mohenjo-daro, on the Indus itself, were planned cities of baked brick, with streets on a grid and drains along them. At their height, some four and a half thousand years ago, they were contemporaries of the cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt. In Gandhara, around Taxila and Peshawar, sculptors carved some of the earliest images of the Buddha in human form. Civilisation upon civilisation, all of it strung along the same water.
A Dozen Peoples Under One Flag
Here are a few of those threads, out of 241 million people and more than seventy languages. Each one would answer my three questions differently.
Rising Punjab and setting Punjab, named for the sun, one people the 1947 line cut in two. Saag and makki di roti, the thunder of the dhol, and a Sufi tradition that gave the world Bulleh Shah and Waris Shah's Heer. Iqbal was born on this soil, and so, less famously, was I.
The land of the lower Indus, and of Sindhis on both sides of the border. Sindhi biryani, the deep crimson of the ajrak, and the Sufi verse of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. Mohenjo-daro sleeps beneath its dust. It is the province I grew up in, and a language I still speak.
One people across the Afghan line. Chapli kabab and Kabuli pulao, the rabab and the whirling attan, and Pashtunwali, a code of honour whose pillars include melmastia: hospitality to any guest who arrives, even a stranger.
The vast, sparse southwest. Sajji roasted whole over open coals, the cry of the suroz, and Balochmayar, a code of honour with hospitality among its pillars, a welcome the desert could not wear down.
Spoken in the Baloch hills and Dravidian at its root, a single startling thread of language that ties these dry mountains to the far south of India, thousands of years deep.
The uplands around Rawalpindi, where Taxila and the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara flourished two thousand years ago, and East met West long before anyone gave it that name.
The divided valley. Rogan josh and the slow ceremony of the wazwan, noon chai poured pink, and Sufiana kalam drifting over some of the most beautiful and most contested mountains on earth.
The peoples of the high valleys under the roof of the world. Balti is a Tibetan tongue, carried down with apricots, mamtu dumplings and folk songs older than any border.
When summer on the plains of Punjab and Sindh passes 45°C, and in a heatwave 50°C, the whole country looks the same way: north. To the cool valleys of Hunza, Skardu and Swat, where the air thins and the apricots ripen on the branch. Above them stands the greatest gathering of high mountains on earth. K2, at 8,611 metres the second-highest point on the planet, rises here. Of the world's fourteen peaks above 8,000 metres, five stand in Pakistan or on its border with China: K2, Nanga Parbat, Gasherbrum I, Broad Peak and Gasherbrum II. And near Gilgit three of the world's great ranges meet, the Karakoram, the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush, within sight of one another. It is where Pakistanis go to feel how small they are.
And still more beyond these: Saraiki, Hindko, the Hazara, and the Kalasha of the high valleys with their own ancient faith. Each its own world.
The Part They All Share
Drop any one of these peoples into the framework and you get a different answer for food, for language, for music. What no column can hold is the part they share.
In the two things that matter most, every one of them is the same: hospitality and resilience. A Pashtun will give a stranger his finest meal and apologise that it is not more. A Sindhi will not let you leave his door unfed. A Punjabi grandmother will overfeed you and be quietly hurt if you try to stop.
Whatever language is spoken at the table, the welcome is total, and so is the strength that keeps it warm through everything history has thrown at this land. It is the country that taught me to improvise with limited resources and keep moving, and I have carried that habit into every job and every country since.
Where Our Craft Went
Living in three countries has taught me how differently respect can be spoken. In Japan it is said out loud, a phrase before the meal and another after it. In Germany it is arriving on time, which is why a stranded professor with fifty young doctors waiting for his lecture once rode in my car from Riem to Haar. In Pakistan it is a plate that keeps being refilled, and a guest who is not allowed to leave hungry.
My theory of nations was really about craft taken seriously as a moral position, and there is more than one place to put that craft. Ours did not go into steel and tolerances and the perfect closing of a car door. It went into the welcome, grown from the soil of the subcontinent and deepened by a faith that treats the guest as a gift from God. The Prophet told everyone who believes in God and the Last Day to honour the guest, and in Urdu we say a guest is God's rehmat, his mercy.
We may not build the world's cars. But no one on earth builds a welcome like we do.
That missing column is more than covered, because what we make instead is something a machine never will.